The lull before MWC sure has quieted things down around here. Even the app sales have declined in number, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Today’s list in particular is… subpar. Despite that, we press onward.

A quick housekeeping note: I will not be around on Friday, so that day’s app sales list will be delayed to Saturday at the earliest.

We still don’t have much solid information about the next release of Android — we’ve heard that Android P could have some notch optimizations and that access to undocumented APIs could get blocked, but we don’t really know too much more than that. However, the open-source nature of Android means that we can sometimes get a glimpse of what the next release of Android might have in store.

As spotted by XDA Developers, a recent commit on AOSP appears to indicate that Android P could implement a rule that would prevent background apps from accessing the camera.

For years, Swype Keyboard was one of the best third-party keyboards for Android, with a focus on swipe typing and voice dictation. But all good things must come to an end, and Nuance Communications Inc has confirmed that Swype is no longer under development.

Snapchat may not have the widest audience compared to social juggernauts like Facebook, but there’s a core of users that have stuck by the service even as competitors like Instagram integrated similar features. Of course, we’ve been more than a bit critical of Snapchat and it’s terrible Android performance over the years—late last year the company promised to (finally) make an effort on the platform. But over the last week, Snapchat has been rolling out a controversial new redesign.

The Server Message Block protocol, better known as SMB, is one of the most popular ways to transfer files over a network. It has been built into Windows for over 20 years (and the open-source Samba implementation is frequently used on other OSes), but version 1.0 has largely fallen out of use thanks to several major security vulnerabilities. Microsoft deprecated SMBv1 in 2014, and Windows 10 no longer includes it.

Back in December, T-Mobile uploaded a two minute-long short to its YouTube channel, in the style of classic stop-motion specials like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. It mostly consists of T-Mobile CEO John Legere telling a story about how he saved the US wireless industry from the “abominable carriers.” It’s a mostly harmless video, but AT&T has decided to file a complaint with the National Advertising Division over it.

The ad only has 11,000 views on YouTube, and an additional 2.5 million views on Twitter, so the video’s impact wasn’t massive in the first place.

Were you not enticed enough by the $ 529.99 refurbished Verizon Pixel 2 deal we posted earlier today? Well, we might have some good news for you; provided that Google has deemed you worthy, you might actually be able to get a brand-new Pixel 2 for less than that. In fact, depending on what configuration of Pixel 2 or Pixel 2 XL you buy, you might be able to save nearly $ 200 over MSRP – quite a significant amount.

Under the stewardship of HMD Global, Nokia’s Android revival has continues apace. The company seems intent on filling out its lineup with every number one through ten, and the next devices rumored to be joining the ranks are the Nokia 7+ and the Nokia 1. Thanks to serial leaker Evan Blass, we now know what they’re going to look like.

Chinese OEM Xiaomi today announced two new mid-range devices for the Indian market. The Redmi Note 5 is essentially a rebranded Redmi 5 Plus, launched at the end of last year, and the Pro variant has the same 5.99″ display but adds a dual camera module, a slightly more powerful processor, and a 6GB RAM option. Let’s take a look at what each phone has to offer.

Shazam has revamped the interface of the song page inside its app. The update, which began rolling out yesterday, brings a fullscreen artist image, replaces the long scrolling page with multiple menus, and gets rid of most of the visual clutter. However, it’s only affecting the free version of Shazam.

Left: Shazam 8.2.2. Right: Shazam 8.3.1.

The difference is pretty clear when you open any song you’ve previously Shazamed.